I could have sworn I owned Mo Moulton's The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (2019) and it is driving me up the wall that if so I can't find it, because I have been noodling on and off at the question of Sayers and queerness ever since discovering that she was published in the sole issue of The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship (1920) and in the process of confirming the co-authorship of the original 1936 stage version of Busman's Honeymoon with Muriel St. Clare Byrne, I was presented with this gem from its pages:
Reading both Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon as the product of collaboration between DLS, Bar, and Muriel changes the texts. It's clear, for one thing, that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as characters are not just ego projections on DLS's part. They are also composite portraits, capturing the conversations she had with Muriel and Bar about relationships and love and work. In a sense, Muriel and Bar become alternate models for Harriet and Peter. There's Muriel, with her curly blond hair, her scattershot brilliance, and her moods; there is Bar, with her grounded intelligence, her dark-haired comeliness, and her ruby cabochon ring, exactly like the ring Peter gives Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon. Bar's students passed along a rumor that she'd been given the ring by a fiancé who had died in the war, but this is probably mixing two things up. Bar's brother, Graham, was killed leading his company into action in August 1918. It would be reasonable to imagine that the ring, meanwhile, was a gift from Muriel, a 'fiancé' who was invisible because of her sex, not her death.
"Bar" is Marjorie Barber, Byrne's life partner. Modeling an ideal het relationship at least partly on a successful queer one is a deeply appealing idea and I'd love to be able to see if it's supported by the rest of the biography, which doesn't seem to be in my possession. I can't have lent it to someone. I didn't think the pandemic had been so dreadful as to make books simply evaporate. [edit] And now the penny's dropped that the same author was responsible for the magnificent "On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions" (2014), I'm really bitter.
[edit edit] I am beginning to think Marblehead these days is permanently overcast: "If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail."
Reading both Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon as the product of collaboration between DLS, Bar, and Muriel changes the texts. It's clear, for one thing, that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as characters are not just ego projections on DLS's part. They are also composite portraits, capturing the conversations she had with Muriel and Bar about relationships and love and work. In a sense, Muriel and Bar become alternate models for Harriet and Peter. There's Muriel, with her curly blond hair, her scattershot brilliance, and her moods; there is Bar, with her grounded intelligence, her dark-haired comeliness, and her ruby cabochon ring, exactly like the ring Peter gives Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon. Bar's students passed along a rumor that she'd been given the ring by a fiancé who had died in the war, but this is probably mixing two things up. Bar's brother, Graham, was killed leading his company into action in August 1918. It would be reasonable to imagine that the ring, meanwhile, was a gift from Muriel, a 'fiancé' who was invisible because of her sex, not her death.
"Bar" is Marjorie Barber, Byrne's life partner. Modeling an ideal het relationship at least partly on a successful queer one is a deeply appealing idea and I'd love to be able to see if it's supported by the rest of the biography, which doesn't seem to be in my possession. I can't have lent it to someone. I didn't think the pandemic had been so dreadful as to make books simply evaporate. [edit] And now the penny's dropped that the same author was responsible for the magnificent "On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions" (2014), I'm really bitter.
[edit edit] I am beginning to think Marblehead these days is permanently overcast: "If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail."
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